The Furrows /// Namwali Serpell

How do you grieve an absence? From the award-winning author of The Old Drift, “a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss” (Raven Leilani, author of Luster).

“A genuine tour de force . . . What seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

Named One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 by More than a Dozen Publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, People, New York magazine, USA Today, and Time

I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt. Their father leaves, starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can’t give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children. 

As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother’s face, the light in his eyes, the way he seems to recognize her, too. But it can’t be, of course. Or can it? Then one day, in another accident, C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the world. His name is Wayne. 

Namwali Serpell’s remarkable new novel captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful—and sometimes willful—longing for reunion with those we’ve lost.

BIO

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard.

REVIEWS

“A triumph…so visceral it leaves the reader breathless.”—New York Magazine

“A novel that reclaims and refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos.”—The New Yorker

“With warmth and dexterity, Serpell has crafted a narrative that underscores how loss can show us the depths of our love.”—Time

“Intimate . . . a miasmic journey through grief and identity, terror and uncertainty, that is finely and compellingly wrought.”—Los Angeles Times

“‘The Furrows’ is an English major’s dream date. Serpell taps influences across genres, from Virginia Woolf to Dashiell Hammett to Toni Morrison.”—The Star Tribune

“Surreal and magical . . . confirms Serpell’s place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today.” --Financial Times

“A wrenching examination of grief, memory, and reality . . .  Let this breathtaking novel roll over you in waves.” --Esquire

“Is there anything more exciting than an artist in their prime? The Furrows follows Namwali Serpell’s tremendous debut . . . with an even more intimate, subversive novel about a woman mourning the disappearance of her younger brother and facing the unpredictability of grief.” --Chicago Tribune

“A gorgeous, surreal meditation on identity and mourning, one that squeezes the heartstrings and rarely relaxes its grip.” --Vulture

[H]  Hogarth Press /  September 27, 2022

1.2" H x 8.3" L x 5.9" W (0.95 lbs) 288 pages